LEWISTON – There’s only one yardstick to determine whether a college education has been successful, University of Southern Maine President Selma Botman said Thursday.

“It’s graduation. We must graduate students. If we don’t, we simply have not met academic quality standards,” she said.

Botman was the featured speaker Thursday at the Great Falls Forum, a monthly lunch series at the Lewiston Public Library. Botman talked how to improve college education and how to encourage more Maine students to seek it out.

Maine has a high number of high school graduates opting out of higher education, despite the fact that college degrees tend to lead to higher-paying jobs.

Higher education itself is becoming more democratized, with people of all ages and from all social strata and educational backgrounds seeking degrees, Botman said. It’s also meant that some people qualify for college acceptance, even when they’re not ready.

“There’s a difference between being admissible and being successful,” she said. Students today need more feedback from instructors, more information about programs and majors to get through college, she said.

“If we are going to embrace excellence in education for our students, we have to look at what we do for them when they are with us – all four years,” Botman said.

She suggested following a trend that began with private colleges, making courses of study more focused.

“In public (colleges), we try and do so much,” she said. “We try and include everything, when it’s not really necessary.”

That confuses things and makes college last longer than necessary.

“I’m interested in studying the work we do along the way, looking at who graduates and what we did to help them along,” she said.

Before taking the job at USM, Botman was executive vice chancellor and university provost for City University of New York, the nation’s largest urban public university. Before that, she served as special assistant to the chancellor of the University of Massachusetts Lowell. She was also vice president for academic affairs at the statewide University of Massachusetts system for six years.

The Great Falls Forum series continues May 21 with gerontologist Nancy Richeson, a faculty member at USM’s College of Nursing and Health. She will present “Boomers and Their Brains: Heading off Memory Loss into the Golden Years.” The lectures are free and open to the public.